No Problem

By Subhash K. Jha

Cast: Anil Kapoor, Sushmita Sen, Sanjay Dutt, Akshaye Khanna, Suniel Shetty, Kangna Ranaut, Paresh Rawal

Director: Anees Bazmi

Rating: * ½

The bad news is that good films are not doing well. But the better news is that bad films are also being rejected.

"No Problem", if we must talk about it, is no better or worse than all the other, comedies that have come and groaned. A series of wildly improbable characters and ideas strung together in sequences of flabbergasting haphazardness, this is the sort of comic romp where the laughter is lost in transit.

The credits boast of four writers. But there is no rhyme in the crime no logic in the laughter.

Just fasten your seat belts and let Anees Bazmi, a fine writer when given better circumstances, take you for a ride. The film opens with Sanjay Dutt and Akshaye Khanna playing two con men Yash and Raj (Yash-Raj, get it? ha ha) rescuing a baby gorilla from the dicky of Paresh Rawal's car.

The baby gorilla and its grateful parents show up in the climax where all the male characters (approximately 33 at last count) are dressed as Sardarjis to sing a song that goes "Kad lamba chaudi chest chest".

Ahem. Chest joking, I guess.

Not too many sequences make much sense in this homage to hectic incoherence. The gags are as flat as Neetu Chandra's belly. She has some funny moments with Suniel Shetty (playing the assassin named, with excruciating unoriginality, Marcos). But the funniest character in the plot is Sushmita Sen. A schizophrenic wife to bumbling-cop Anil Kapoor, she does the split-personality act with lip-smacking relish.

You often wonder what a woman as gorgeous as Ms Sen is doing in a place as farcical as this where anarchy prevails. Nothing makes sense. Nothing is supposed to. The film is shot in South Africa. For what purpose, we will never know. The film's confounding idiocies could have easily been located in Matunga or Mangalore.

The most important component of a situational comedy is that the actors must LOOK like they're having fun. There is not much below-surface camaraderie among the actors. Anil Kapoor brings in a zany fun into his self-deprecating role. But really, just the ability to laugh at oneself is not enough.

You have to communicate that laughter to the world that's watching you. On that score "No Problem" simply parts ways with the audience.